2008

Pad.ma (short for Public Access Digital Media Archive) is a Web-based archive of annotated video content—primarily clips, footage, and unfinished films, largely from urban India—that aggregates material that might otherwise be lost in the editing process and filmmaking ecosystem. The result is a singular collection of footage, much of it fragmentary, that provides glimpses into places and narratives. Pad.ma currently contains more than six hundred of what the website calls video “events” on a range of subjects, including “changing cityscapes, street and domestic life . . . protests, chance meetings, police raids, train-rides . . . conversations with community, state, and corporate interests . . . [and] found footage.” The entire collection, densely tagged by timeline, location, and theme, can be viewed online and is free to download for noncommercial use. Pad.ma’s community of users includes independent filmmakers, activists, and artists who can contribute material to the archive without worrying about whether or not it is finished; the site’s focus on linking and reuse proposes a new kind of viewing and contextualization. Pad.ma, its creators say, “expands upon the perhaps inevitable destiny of all video in digital form: that it becomes possible to distribute, share, annotate, reuse, and reinterpret it, even as the original ‘author’s’ intentions expire, and contexts change.”